The Modalities of Azerbaijan's Islamic Revival

Islamic revival on the societal level has become a much-touted subject in Azerbaijan in recent years. Ongoing controversy over an informal state ban on hijabs in the country's public education institutions, along with a number of recent government-sponsored research projects and conferences on religion, attest to the increasing salience of Islam as a social and political issue, even as the Azerbaijani state remains staunchly secular and instrumentalizes Islam primarily for legitimization purposes.

Yet, if Azerbaijani society is indeed experiencing an Islamic revival, what are the manifestations of its increasing religiosity? According to data from the Caucasus Barometer (CB) and CRRC's 2012 Social Capital, Media and Gender Survey (SIDA), religious indicators such as overt religious practices and trust in religious institutions have actually shown negative trends in the last five years. Nevertheless, other indicators suggest that Azerbaijanis' private religious practices and conceptions of personal religiosity may be gaining greater currency.

According to the CB 2008, 10% of people in Azerbaijan claimed to attend religious services on at least a weekly basis, while 7% and 36% attended at least once a month or on special holidays, respectively. Around 20% of Azerbaijanis attended services "less often" and nearly 30% "never" attended.

Religious service attendance has changed little in the last five years. According to the 2012 survey, only 6% of Azerbaijanis said they attended services at least once a week, with 11% indicating they attended at least once a month and 40% claiming only on religious holidays. Almost 25% and 20% of Azerbaijanis claimed they attended services "less often" and "never", respectively.

Azerbaijanis' trust in religious institutions likewise decreased between 2008 and 2011. In addition to local mosques, the institutions in question could refer to the Caucasus Muslim Board - a state-affiliated organization including Shia and Sunni leadership due to Azerbaijan's approximate 60/30% Shia-Sunni population - and the State Committee for Work with Religious Organizations - likewise a state-affiliated entity, tasked with regulating religious organizations operating in the country.

The institutional trust factor is especially significant, as research suggests that a country's level of religiosity depends on the authority of its religious institutions (Chaves 1994). In turn, this authority is measured by the degree of individuals' confidence in religious institutions (Kleiman, Ramsey, & Palazzo 1996). According to the CB from 2008 to 2011, there was a 17% decrease in the number of Azerbaijanis who "fully trust" religious institutions, with a slight decrease for those who trust religious institutions "a lot" and no change for those who "somewhat" trust said institutions.

Despite decreases in active religiosity, CRRC data suggest that personal conceptions of religiosity and private religious practices are becoming more important for Azerbaijanis. Between 2010 and 2012, the combined total of Azerbaijanis who claimed they were "quite" or "very" religious increased from 16% to 27%. During the same period, those claiming they were "somewhat religious" jumped from 23% to 32%.Perhaps even more telling are 2012 data measuring the frequency of praying at home. Despite low mosque attendance, a sizeable 30% of Azerbaijanis claimed to pray at home at least once a day, while 27% said they prayed at home at least once a week and 12% once a month.

Other sources of data suggest similar trends. A 2011 poll conducted by the Center for Strategic Research indicated that 21% of Azerbaijanis were interested in religious questions "to a large extent", while 46% expressed interest "to a certain extent" and 24% to a "lesser extent." Only 9% of Azerbaijanis claimed they had "virtually no interest" in religious questions.

Even if overt religious indicators such as mosque attendance and trust remain quite low, the fact that Azerbaijanis increasingly think of themselves as more religious indicates that religiosity may be growing on a more personal, passive level. That over 50% of Azerbaijanis pray at home on at least a weekly basis is likewise an indication that private religious practices may be serving as the primary modalities of Azerbaijan's Islamic revitalization.

The development of local think tanks in Azerbaijan has taken a different route to that followed by most other post-Soviet states and Eastern European countries. In the Eastern Bloc countries, research institutes modeled on Western think tanks became increasingly popular following the collapse of the Soviet Union. However, in Azerbaijan this did not happen, largely due to domestic political developments in the early 1990s.

Dustin Gilbreath: You recently recently pointed out that think tanks in the South Caucasus have come a long way in recent years, but that they still face challenges on some of the fundamentals – quality of research, policy relevance, funding, and operational acumen. At the national rather than regional level, what are the relative strengths of and challenges before the think tank sector of each country?

Starting from similarly troubled slates at the turn of independence, the South Caucasus countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia – have diverged over the last 25 years, and the region is an interesting case of divergence despite similarity. While in Azerbaijan the government is squeezing the last bit of free expression from the country, Georgia is having its problems but is by far the freest place in the region. Armenia still has space for engagement, but it is not as open as Georgia.

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Robert Putnam’s 1993 work Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy marked a seminal moment in the development of institutionalism. Putnam’s exhaustive study of the relationship between the governed and governing in the Italian regions contained the discovery that public opinion provides an accurate picture of actual government performance: “The Italians’ gradually increasing satisfaction with the regional governments … corresponded to real differences in performance,” and in each region Putnam’s measurement of performance was “remarkably consistent with the appraisals offered by the regional attentive public and by the electorate as a whole.”

On July 5, 2011 Georgia adopted a new legislative amendment into the country’s civil code stating that religious minority groups with “historic ties to Georgia” or those defined as religions by members of the Council of Europe can register as legal entities of public law. The initial draft of the law specifically mentioned the Roman Catholic Church, Muslim and Jewish communities, Armenian Apostolic Church and the Evangelical Baptist Church as having “close historic ties with Georgia”. However, the final draft did not specifically name these five groups.

In a recent datablog, the Guardian published a map visualizing how the former Soviet countries are doing 20 years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The map compares the 15 former Soviet countries in terms of economic development, demographics and democratic transition. It also divides the countries into five regions: Russia, the Baltic countries, the EU borderlands, Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

Earlier this month The Economist published two articles (article one, article two) on imbalances in gender. In all societies there is, at birth, a sex ratio slightly biased in favor of boys: 103-106 boys to 100 girls. The number evens out later on as male babies have a higher mortality rate than female babies. In some parts of the world, however, there currently is an abnormally high number of boys being born.

In 2007 we wrote a blog post on the Big Mac Index, an index published by The Economist as an informal way of measuring purchasing power parity (PPP). The idea is that a dollar should buy you the same amount in all countries, and as a Big Mac is assumed to be produced in the same way everywhere it can serve as a point of comparison. You can thus determine how far off the exchange rate is between countries, in terms of citizens’ ability to buy the same “basket” of goods and services (in this case a Big Mac hamburger).

Freedom House has just released its Nations in Transitreport for the year 2010. The report attempts to quantify democratic development in Central European and Eurasian states by observing 8 separate factors – for instance, Electoral Process and National Democratic Governance - which affect the level of democracy in a given country. Each category is graded on a score of 1 to 7, with 1 representing the highest level of democratic progress, and 7 representing the lowest. Much of the media attention has typically focused on Russia.

Many academics argue that the influence of the media is especially strong in environments where citizens depend on a limited number of news sources. In contrast, when citizens have alternative sources of information they are less subject to the potential effects of media.

In a previous post we wrote about the PISA scores of 15-year olds in Azerbaijan. As you may recall, PISA is an international test of competency, primarily focusing on reading, mathematics and science. Azerbaijan deserves particular praise for participating in this challenging international exercise: the results in science were not altogether flattering, but it's better to take part than to stand aside, and it can only be hoped that Georgia and Armenia will also be taking part soon.

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The CRRC Data Initiative (DI) gives people an opportunity to do interesting cross-country comparisons of the South Caucasus (SC) people’s attitude toward their neighbors. This subject is quite sensitive and complex when thinking of the fact that the SC stands out for its sequence of ethnic conflicts.

Results of the World Bank’s Doing Business 2009project, claims to present "objective measures of business regulations and their enforcement across 181 economies and selected cities at the sub-national and regional level", were made public today.

World Public Opinion is the initiative of the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland that explores public opinion on a variety of topics in 25 countries across the globe, including Azerbaijan, the only South Caucasus country represented in the survey. Russia and Ukraine are the other two former USSR countries that the project includes.

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As discussed in the first part of this blog post, the results of CRRC-Georgia’s survey conducted for the Georgian Civil Society Sustainability Initiative (CSSIGE) project in fall 2017 confirmed that both knowledge about NGOs and trust toward them is quite low in Georgia. This blog post looks at the inconsistency between low trust toward NGOs, on the one hand, and quite positive assessments of their activities, on the other hand.